Some unanswered questions, or unaddressed observations, from my previous two posts (here and here) regarding why girls tend to be more successful than boys in school.
Validity vs. reliability. Girls perform reliably better at school than boys, but that does not imply the validity of the institution itself. I suspect school can be thought of as a game with a particular set of rules, and that those rules, in the aggregate, tend to favor one gender over the other. In other words, the arguments are silent on whether or not the game itself is any good; it’s simply that there is a game, and that on average girls perform better than boys at the game.
I have no idea the gender makeup of the very top students, i.e., if we took the top 3% of students (based on GPA) from every highschool, would there be a reliable gender difference, and if so, would it cut across the same lines? I suspect it would, but I genuinely do not know.
Similarly, while IQ averages between boys and girls are the same, the distributions might be different, i.e. girls tend to cluster in the middle, while there is a greater range for boys. If this is the case, then more boys would fail since more boys are at the left hand side of the IQ distribution (hypothetically, more boys would be on the right, as well). I’m personally not moved by this, because I think success in 7-12 is loosely correlated with IQ (maybe not at all beyond a minimum threshold). I suspect success in school is more likely the result of obedience, friendliness, organization, and appreciation of aesthetics while dealing with conventions (handwriting, slides, font type, etc.), and less the result of the speed and ability in which abstract concepts are understood and manipulated.
The gender gap in high school graduation has not always been a fact. As best as I can tell, high school graduation was approximately the same for boys and girls up until around 1965 or 1970 (the gender gap in college enrollment started around 1985). What changed in American education, or with American teenagers, during this time, that resulted in a gender gap in 4 year graduation rates, etc.?
I am also curious about all boy schools. Do they typically do something differently, or prioritize differently, to cater to young men?